5 Lies About Advertising and Why They’re All Nonsense

Advertising sometimes gets a bad rap for being an industry full of lies. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of agencies out there that continue to perpetuate this untrustworthy image. Luckily, we’re not one of those agencies. That’s why we’ve taken the time to debunk these five common lies about advertising.

1. Advertising doesn’t work 

Where do we even begin with this one?

Last year, businesses across the United States spent over $190 billion on advertising. Would thousands of businesses would spend that much money on something that didn’t work? No, probably not.

Advertising does work, believe us. We’ve seen businesses grow their sales monumentally from well-timed, well-placed ad campaigns. Now, bad ads, those don’t work; that’s true. But a properly designed, well-thought out, creative campaign will work every time.

2. It’s a magic pill to skyrocket business 

Advertising can help boost your business, but a successful company needs more than just good ads.

Advertising works, but it’s not a magic pill to skyrocket your business. Anyone that tells you that is probably trying to sell you ad space. Advertisements are a necessary and essential part of growing your business, but they’re not everything. To grow your business, you first need a great product. Then you need a well-designed and functioning website and a catchy logo. But don’t stop there. You’ll also want a social media presence, a great customer service team, and a lot of time and determination. Add in an ad campaign, and you have a recipe for success.

Think of your business as a cake. You can’t make a delicious cake with one ingredient, just as you can’t grow a business with one tool. Ads are one essential ingredient, but that alone is not going to magically make your business successful.

3. It’s costly

Some ads are costly, we’ll give you that. A spot on primetime television? Yes, that’s going to cost you. A full page print ad in Real Simple? It’s less expensive than you think – especially when you work with an agency.

Whether your budget is $500 or $500,000, there’s a way to make advertising work for you without breaking the bank. If your budget is tight, try digital advertising or sponsoring a few posts on Facebook and/or Instagram. You can do this for as little as $10. You can also look at booking a package of ads, which usually brings the price down when you book more than one page at a time.

If your budget is small, consider advertising on social media or adding digital to your campaign. These options tend to be less expensive than print, television or radio ads.

Advertising can be expensive if done incorrectly, but that doesn’t mean it all costs a fortune.

4. One advertisement is enough 

If you are thinking about planning an ad campaign, please listen to this very carefully: one advertisement is not enough.

We see this happen all the time with clients. They’ll book one ad, then stop and wonder why they never saw a spike in sales. Advertising doesn’t work overnight; it doesn’t work instantly; and it doesn’t work when you only commit to one ad. If anyone tells you it does, they’re lying.

The most important word in this industry is frequency. You must (at a bare minimum) run at least three ads before your business will start to notice a difference. Advertising is something you need to commit to long-term. We promise, it’ll eventually pay off. But you need to be patient, and you need to be willing to book more than one space.

5. I can’t see results 

Your campaign results are much easier to track than you might think. Digital ads, on one hand, are incredibly easy to measure. By using a tool like Google Analytics, it’s easy to see how many impressions and clicks your ads have received. It’s also fairly easy to find out how many of those clicks converted into sales. When planning a campaign with an agency, it’s even simpler. All you have to do is request to have a report sent to you on a monthly basis to see how your ads are performing.

With technology continually evolving, it’s easier than ever to track your advertising performance.

Print ads are a little harder to measure, but not impossible. If you provide a coupon code with your advertisement, this makes it much simpler to track which purchases are a direct result of a shopper seeing your ad. However, if you don’t provide a coupon code, it’ll still be fairly easy to tell how well your ads are performing; you just need to pay attention to your sales around the time your advertisements are published.

Advertising works. It’s necessary. It won’t cost you an arm and a leg, and most importantly, it’s not hard. If someone tries to tell you these lies, just continue to plan your ad campaign and watch the numbers speak for themselves.